


we who wander this wasteland

by venndaai



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brief Mention of Suicide, Fix-It of Sorts, Multi, Susan Delgado Deserved Better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 07:38:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4556265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On another level, Susan Delgado seeks the Tower.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we who wander this wasteland

 

  
I.

Susan dreamed of the Tower as the cards shuffled, and opened her eyes to quiet rain. She was lying on the filthy remnants of her bedroll, sheltered in the lee of a knoll. Her two had constructed some sort of makeshift cover that kept the rain out from her other three sides. There were branches from the spindly trees latticed a foot above her face, blanketed with a layer of leaves. She could hear the raindrops dancing on the smooth slick surfaces of the leaves, but no drops got through to set her weakened body shivering.

The blur before her eyes resolved into Eddie Dean's beardless face. “Aw yeah, woo-hoo,” he said, “the Duchess has decided to grace us with her presence today. Hip-hip-hooray.”

Carefully, Susan curled the fingers of her unruined hand until only the longest one remained upright, then raised it slowly so Eddie could see it well.

“I can see someone's feeling better,” Eddie muttered. “Don't doze off on me now, Sleeping Beauty. Suze'll be back in-” He paused, frowning. “Jeez, I can't be calling you both Suze. But I sure as shit can't start calling you Susan. Makes you sound like a schoolteacher. Yes, Miss Susan, right away, Miss Susan. I'll start thinking you're all sweet and harmless, instead of a mad fucking bat from hell.”

“You talk too much,” the gunslinger said. She wanted to tell him to shut up. He was reminding her of Cuthbert again and it hurt more now that she was lucid. Her calf throbbed dully, a nice physical pain to compliment the emotional one. A reminder of her failure. The lobstrosities wouldn't have been fast enough to get Cuthbert or Roland. No true born gunslinger would have let such sad creatures tear away most of her lower leg. But they weren't there. They had died on the hill and the world had moved on.

He shrugged. “Yeah, you've only told me a million times. No help for it, Lady S. I've got a rambling tongue, always did, long before the white stuff. You're welcome to try smacking me upside the head, but if that worked I'd have been cured years ago.”

A thought swam into focus. “Rain,” she said. “Water.”

Eddie grinned. “Yes mam. The water of life, at least compared to that dead shit we've been drinking. Started an hour ago. Frustrating as all hell to collect it, but the waterskin's half full now. You want a taste?”

She nodded. It was frightening, how much effort that small movement required.

He brought the wooden mouth of the waterskin to her peeling lips, and held it there while she guzzled the sweet rainwater greedily. When she was done he wiped the water droplets from her chin with the hem of his shirt. She remembered how it had galled her, back on the beach, to be so dependent on any man, even a boy who needed her as surely as she needed him. It had been terrible, that vulnerability. But the fear and anger had passed, leaving only trust. In Eddie, and in ka.

Her mind was drifting. She dug a nail into her palm to jerk herself back into wakefulness. They were gone, her dark-haired boys, gone before they ever had the chance to become men, and she had moved on with the world, her gold hair going tan with dust and gray with age, the soft girl skin that had been so hatefully desired going dry and cracked. Roland's guns were still as well-oiled as they'd been the day she took them from his cooling body, and the polished surface of the horn was marred only by the long crack it had received on that bloody morning. Everything else had moved on. Her ka-tet was lost and now she was given this Eddie Dean, this boy with all of Cuthbert's foolishness and none of his deadly cold bloodlust.

“You know what, forget it,” she heard Eddie say, distantly. “Sleep if you want. I'll wake you when she gets back.” His fingers brushed the hair from her brow. She was comforted by the gesture, and she slept.

 

* * *

 

 

II.

The first time Roland had given her a loaded gun, the rush of power had almost overwhelmed her. She had seen what the ancient revolvers could do. She knew she could get on her horse right that minute, ride back to that ugly town and blow great gaping holes in every last one of the men and women who'd stood by and watched the mayor and the witch touch her thighs and breasts and hidden tender places. She wanted to do it. Her mouth filled with copper. Her grip on the gun turned to brittle steel and she fired, feeling the recoil shake from her arm all through her body. The tin can on the edge of the boulder exploded into sharp metal shards that buried themselves in the surrounding tree trunks. She could smell nothing but gunpowder. She could hear nothing but the echo of that almighty bang.

Then Cuthbert's delighted laugh intruded on her silence, and the spell was broken. “Arthur Eld,” he cried, and the joy in his voice set happiness buzzing in her bones. “If ever man, woman or beast was born to be a gunslinger-”

Alain filled the pause Cuthbert had left for him. “I know it took me three weeks at least on live ammunition to shoot that true. I've never seen anyone pick it up this fast.” Susan felt her face flush at the compliment. Her father had warned her of pride, but this sense of rightness could not possibly be a sin.

From behind her and to the left, Roland spoke in his quiet, measured way. “It was well done, Susan,” he said, and his hand touched her elbow in silent congratulations. “It was very well done, and with a steady heart.”

She turned and offered him the heavy weapon, sandalwood handle first; but he shook his head, just a single sideways jerk, nay, Susan, my dear. “Keep it,” he told her, young face serious, blue eyes still as stone. “A gunslinger should have a gun.”

She gazed at him then with wide amazement, and holstered the revolver with the greatest of care. Turning, she saw Cuthbert's mouth had twisted, and she understood what he was feeling: envy, that he had not thought to offer her his weapon first, combined with shameful relief, that Roland should be the one giving up half his soul in sacrifice at her altar. Susan comprehended it all in a flash. She grinned at him, bright and happy, and held the brightness til she saw him start to grin back. A smile transformed his face almost as much as it did Roland's. He turned from brooding tempest to merry summer breeze, and the change left her breathless at his beauty. But she moved on, and turned her favor on Alain, who smiled back at her in utterly peaceful contentment.

They loved her, these boy-men. Alain perhaps in a different way than Roland and Cuthbert, but the four of them were ka-tet and bound by devotion as much as destiny. It made her feel as powerful as the gun had done. It made her want to be a gunslinger, even knowing from their stories that no common-blooded rancher's child had carried the guns in their lifetime, and certainly no woman, not since the time of myth and legend. Standing in the wooded clearing with Roland's gun warm on her hip and the boys all looking at her in adoration, Susan knew that she was a gunslinger, pure and simple, and no manner of disapproval from Gilead's tall towers could ever change that unshakeable fact.

Alain died under the roar of their guns seven years later. Two months after that, she sat with Cuthbert on a red hill and together they held Roland, and kissed him as his blood soaked into the trampled earth. When Roland's faded blue eyes turned to empty glass marbles, Cuthbert lurched to his feet. The horn of Arthur Eld sounded out over the plain for a long moment before the ancient artifact cracked under the blistering heat of Cuthbert's despair. Susan watched him drop the horn, and she thought perhaps he saw his road to the Tower illuminated in the flash of the enemy artillery as he ran to meet their bullets.

Susan's Tower was a long ways away yet. She took the horn and Roland's gun and walked from that field of carnage, and she kept walking, across a world that had moved on. She was the last gunslinger, and for twenty years or more there was only the Tower, and the road that would take her there.

 

* * *

 

 

III.

But now-

now she woke to soft voices and the sound of rain.

“I don't even know, Suze. I mean, I never had any, y'know, female authority figure, unless you want to count my fourth grade homeroom teacher. Mom was around for a while, but even when she was around she wasn't really around, you know? All I ever had was Henry, and, well,” Eddie laughed. “The old lady's about as different from Henry as a person can get.”

“But you love her.” Susannah's voice. Warm and rich and melodic. Beautiful.

“Don't you?”

“I'll tell you this much,” Susannah said, “it wasn't my father's face I was seeing when I blew those ugly critters away. He was a good man, a strong man, but he was no gunslinger.”

“I never knew my father,” Eddie said. “But yeah, I know what you're saying.” He laughed again, and there was wonder in it. “She ain't my father, nor my mother, not sister, brother, lover. But if the old stick finally gave up the ghost tonight, I think I'd put a bullet in my brain tomorrow.”

Susan remembered Cuthbert, and had to stifle a flinch.

“I don't know about that, honey.” Susannah sounded thoughtful. “I think the two of us might just keep crawling towards that damned Tower till we couldn't crawl no more.”

This was worse, and her whole body shuddered with the sharp pain of guilt and heartache. Gunslinger, what have ye done to these two, your latest victims?

“Hey, hey now, sugar,” and Susannah's hand was warm on her forehead. The gunslinger opened her eyes, and saw Susannah frowning, and even that looked pleasing on that small and beautiful face. “Still got that furnace going under your skin. How do you feel?”

“Cold,” Susan said, because it was true. Not as cold as those endless desert nights had been, not even close, but the fever had been eating at her body fat, and she hadn't had a whole lot to spare. She wanted to tell Susannah that her father hadn't been a killer either, that he'd only ever wanted to raise his horses in peace. The words didn't come.

“It's the rain,” Susannah said, and she wrapped her arm around the gunslinger's bony shoulders, and Eddie settled in on Susan's other side, and the rain came down pitter-patter, pitter-patter on the ceiling of branches.

“I saw deer tracks out there, by the stream,” Susannah said. “I'd show y'all, but I suspect they'll be all washed out by the time this rain stops.”

“Good,” Susan said. “If you can manage to shoot one, I'll show you how to tan and cure the hide, and then we'll have a proper cover to keep out the wet.” She felt light-headed at the possibilities. Deer meant guts that could be dried to cord, meant she could dig out the big bone needle in her purse and sew them all proper jackets, bags to carry supplies, belts for their guns and ammunition. A tunic to replace the shirt she'd torn to shreds on the endless beach, and if they succeeded in tanning the leather, perhaps even boots to replace those chewed up by the beach's inhabitants.

“I got it,” Eddie said, and snapped the fingers of his left hand. He pointed across the gunslinger's chest, at Susannah. “You'll be Suze, and you-” he gestured to the gunslinger- “you're Sue. Perfect.”

Sue. The gunslinger considered it. No one had called her Sue since her father had died. The diminutive made her feel like a girl again. She decided that wasn't necessarily bad.

Susannah's laughter almost sparkled in the close humid air of the lean-to. The gunslinger felt clever fingers tease gently at the coarse ends of her braid. “This fishtail's gone a bit messy,” she said, and she was suddenly hesitant, in a way she'd not been before, not with the gunslinger. “Would you like me to straighten it for you?”

The gunslinger nodded.

Susannah was practiced and quick. The braid was undone in a matter of moments, and then there were gentle strong fingers combing through Susan's tangled straw-dry hair, caressing her scalp and soothing her feverish head. No one had ever touched Susan this way. She had never had a mother to brush her hair with love, and Cordelia had yanked the big bone comb through young Susan's tangles, jerking her skull like Susan's bright gold locks were a personal affront. Susan leaned back into Susannah's hands. The gunslinger had never loved a woman. She had felt a pang of sympathy and pity in her heart for Gabrielle Deschain, and wept at her death, but there had been no friendship there to blossom into love. Susannah hummed as she began the braid, a low vibration almost like a cat's purr, and the gunslinger's head was turned from Susannah's face but she saw in her mind's eye the bright brown gaze and sweet curved mouth of her new ka-mate, and she at last understood how a woman's smile could drive men mad. If Eddie was Cuthbert reborn, given, this time, a heart a bit less painfully twisted, then by that logic, who was Susannah? Her wisdom and courage reminded Susan of Alain; her focus and determination were the equal of Roland's; but in the end, the gunslinger knew, Susannah Dean was very much one-of-a-kind.

“Time for your medicine,” Eddie said, and handed the gunslinger the waterskin and one of the precious Keflex pills. Susan swallowed them dry.

“I'm not going to die,” she said, and for the first time in weeks believed the statement with the comfort of absolute certainty.

Susannah tied off the braid. It was Susan's one vanity, that waist-length hank of gray-gold strands. How many times over the years had she gone to chop it off, only to remember that morning on the river-bank, Roland's knife clutched tight in fingers that moved against the orders of her brain? She kept her hair to spite the witch, and because she liked to feel the weight of it at her back. “You sure ain't, sugar,” Susannah said.

Satisfied, Susan, formerly of Hambry, then of Gilead, and now of nowhere in particular, rested her head on Eddie's shoulder and slept.

 

* * *

 

 

 

IV.

Shuffle, but slower than before. The rain stopped. The fever lifted. The Tower called more insistently in her dreams. She kept finding herself on the great plain, the dark brown stone of the Tower in the distance before her. She could see that to get there she would have to wade through a knee-deep ocean of blood.

Tell me something I don't know, she thought, and the voice in her head sounded a bit like Eddie and a bit like (Jake, the boy she had let fall) (there was no boy) her own voice, higher and stronger and twenty years younger.

 

* * *

 

 

V.

“You see it, don't you?” Roland asked her once. “The Tower.” If anyone else had been asking, she would have said they sounded desperate. A tormented visionary, seeking confirmation of their own sanity. But Roland was never uncertain or lost, and he didn't have the imagination for visions.

“I think so,” Susan replied, and didn't say anything more.

He did not push her, just nodded.

She could have told him they all saw the Tower in the dark behind their eyelids. They all heard its irresistible call. Alain resisted it. Cuthbert resented it with all the fierce love/hate his burning heart was capable of. Susan herself was more than a little afraid of it. Only Roland was eager, his desire for the Tower uncomplicated by any shade of doubt.

“You see it,” Cuthbert said, a statement, not a question, and Susan nodded, for she could clearly make out the shadowy shape of Gilead, outlined in fire against the setting sun. As the four led their horses down a dirt track that joined a great and busy road, she felt a thrill rush through her that was both exultant joy and certain dread at once.

Susan had been told that Gilead was ruled by a council of the wise, but it didn't take a gunslinger's eagle eyes to see that Roland's father was first among equals. Once it would have pleased her to know her Will a gunslinger prince; now it saddened her for reasons she could not voice. Steven Deschain, and all the grown men of his generation, watched Susan with suspicion and distrust. She knew they thought her obscene for wearing men's jeans, for chewing tobacco til it stained her teeth yellow, for daring to open her shirt a little in the heat, as the boys around her stripped to the waist. You have forgotten the faces of your fathers, she told them silently when she saw them giving her a glare, and you do not deserve those guns you treat with more deference than your wives.

Still, Gilead was better than Hambry by a long mile. She spent her days on the ramparts with Alain, letting the cool breeze play with her braid. At night she joined Cuthbert and Roland in Roland's bed, for the three of them were far too young for caution or discretion. She slept with a revolver within easy reach.

And she kept her pregnancy secret. She didn't know why, at first, and then one night she opened her eyes and realized she did not wish to be married, not at seventeen, not to a boy who was not yet a man. And though Susan had never had a drop of the Sight, she could see with great clarity how things would unfold once she spoke. Roland would wed her. His stringent code of honor would demand it. Susan would bear the child and she would lose her gun and her jeans and her horse and her father's face. She would be a gunslinger's wife, and that was a better title than Mayor's gilly, but Susan watched Gabrielle Deschain wander desolate through her husband's halls, starting at every sound like a trapped rat, and Susan thought she would rather die.

Alain knew. Hard to keep secrets around Alain and his mysterious knowledge. Later she told him she had miscarried, and he nodded and seemed to accept it.

Susan kept her gun, the gun that had once been Steven Deschain's, and when the gunslingers rode against Farson's ever-bolder raids she rode with them. She would never have the speed of her ka-mates but when she shot she shot true, every single time. Susan killed, and she healed, and she danced the commala at midsummer's eve.

Throughout it all there was the song of the Tower, and the smell of smoke and decay blowing in from the West. For Susan the world had just begun, but all around her it was already moving on, as it had been moving since long before she was born.

 

* * *

 

  
VI.

In the great forest beyond the endless beach, the gunslinger who was no longer Last walked on a soft blanket of pine needles. Her leg was bad, and unlikely to get any better, but with the aid of a sturdy walking-stick she could more than keep up with Eddie, who was pushing Susannah's wheelchair. The air was fresh and crisp. Susan wanted to tell her companions stories of In-World-That-Was, but she'd never been any good at reciting tales. So instead she sung, and her voice was old but it still had a stately sweetness to it all the same.

Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love his fondest wish.

The sun rose high in the heavens, and they halted, built a fire and laid out their collection of hides and bags close to the heat of the flames, ate venison wrapped in leaves, the dark juice dripping through their fingers. Eddie carved, and Susan taught, in her classroom made of trees, with its roof of dark green and its floor of brown. Susannah learned, or made a game of learning, rather. Susan observed her apprentice thoughtfully. There was mischief in those beautiful brown eyes, and Susan loved it but knew it was not just spirit that made one a killer (gunslinger) (murderer) (knight-errant) (seeker of the tower).

“What did those sticks ever do to you, big girl?” Susannah asked, aiming her gun at the shards of wood Susan had set up as targets. “Seems silly to shoot at 'em. I want to take a nice big buck, not a branch.”

Susan folded her arms. “They're not branches,” she said.

“Really?” The mischief was all over Susannah's face now. “Then that's some mighty fine camouflage. Color me very impressed.”

“They're the men who knocked over your wheelchair and locked you in that cell for hours,” Susan said.

Susannah scowled, her joy vanishing. “No, they're not,” she said. “They're just bits of wood.”

“They hurt you, did they not?” Susan murmured, so low her apprentice strained to hear the words, but her voice grew louder. “The men in Oxford Town who broke your pride. The boys in the wastelands who wanted to make you their plaything. The man who broke your mind, and pushed you from that platform for no reason but the random satisfaction of his mindless cruelty-”

“That's done,” Susannah insisted sharply, “that's over, there's no need to bring that trash all up again-”

“Shoot true, Susannah Dean,” the gunslinger shouted, and the sweetness of her song was gone; all that remained was rusted steel, everything soft long ago stripped away by those hot, dry desert winds. “Shoot as you'd shoot the men who hurt you, for there are always such men, in every world that ever was, but shoot true, Susannah, and we shall kill them with our hearts, for our mother's sakes.”

The targets exploded in a shower of woodchips, Susannah's bullets finding their way straight to the heart of every shard of wood. Susannah shook. “What are you doing to me,” she cried, shaking so hard she had to touch the wheels of her chair to steady herself.

I am hammering you on the devil's anvil, the gunslinger thought but did not say. In that moment she knew she could no longer do what was necessary at the expense of what was right. She fell to her knees by the chair. “I cry your pardon,” she said. “I no longer know how to be kind. I have done thee wrong.”

“Nay, say not so,” Susannah said in the High Speech, not knowing where the words were coming from, not caring. There were tears in her eyes. She touched the gunslinger's wind-chafed face. “You were hurt once, too, weren't you? I didn't see, before.”

The gunslinger kissed her.

It was over before Susannah was able to react. “No,” Susan said. “Forgive me, I- no.”

“Why not?”

“I cannot,” she said. “I am your teacher and your leader, I can be those things, I can even be your mother if that is what is needed, but this- it was foolish. I am sorry.” She stumbled to her feet, and backed away.

“Wait,” Susannah said, and reached for her, but she was already out of range. “If this is about that thrice-cursed Tower- if you've got some hairbrained notion that we'd distract you or some shit- love isn't a weakness, Susan!”

The gunslinger gave her a ghost of a smile. “Of course not,” she said. “Your love for Eddie is very fine. It will help on our quest. I think about these things, because I am a- how would Eddie put it?- stone-cold bitch.”

“I can love you both,” Susan said. “My head won't explode, you know.”

“It's not you,” Susan said. She thought of saying, it's me. You see, I'm going mad- No. This wasn't the time.

Susannah thought, we share a name, and yet we're so far from understanding each other we might as well be standing on different planets.

“Ladies,” Eddie said.

Susan actually jumped a little in the air. Susannah giggled, emotions wound tight and then suddenly snapped. Eddie grinned. He was leaning tall and long against a tree trunk, all cocksure charm and languid grace.

“Didn't mean to interrupt,” he said. “Whatever you two were... doing.” He waved a hand lazily in the air.

Susannah giggled harder as Susan flushed a deep sunburn red. “You're supposed to be watching the camp,” she accused.

“It'll do fine on its own for a minute, Anxious Annie,” Eddie replied. He tossed her something. Even in her flustered state, her hand snapped up automatically to grab it out of the air. She brought it down, and opened her palm.

It was a tiny carving, a small, fierce bear shaped from soft gray wood. The gunslinger stared at it. She felt it was looking back at her, with its proud, inquisitive face.

Bird and bear-

She coughed to clear her throat. “You have a gift, Eddie Dean.”

It was his turn to blush.

“I think we were about done here anyway,” Susannah said, and the gunslinger nodded, and coughed again. Concern cast a shadow on Eddie's sunny mood. He watched his dinh as they trekked back through sun-dappled woods, but she did not cough again, and he decided the deadly illness was not returning.

The late summer sun slipped down into the trees, and when Eddie and Susannah got up in the night and circled the fire to lie down on either side of their friend, it was, perhaps, not entirely due to the cold. Susan did not protest. She passed uneasily through dreams of the boy and of the sea of blood before the Tower, but each time she jolted awake, she listened to their steady breathing and was comforted.

Bird and bear and hare and fish-

 

* * *

 

  
IV. ASSORTED FACTS RELATING TO OUR TALE.

1) On every level of the Tower where Susan Delgado escaped the pyre, she was the last gunslinger, the one to make it across the desert. On no level did she ever reach her goal. She died in Lud, in New York, was hit by a car in Maine, strangled by the Crimson King, murdered by her own son reincarnate. Eddie went on and climbed the Tower's winding steps- Jake- Callahan- most often Susannah- when all else failed, even Oy was capable of passing through the final door and ensuring a continuing of the cycle. But never Susan Delgado. Because no version of her ever made it to the first step, no twin ever had that subconscious memory to guide their steps to the threshold- one of the self-satisfying paradoxes upon which the Tower is built.

2) Roland had guessed wrong: Jake Chambers was not Susan's twinner. Susan, however, guessed right when she figured that Susannah Dean was unique. Dettas and Odettas the Tower had in plenty, but there was only one Susannah, and she cycled through the levels, and each time more of her memory returned to her in dreams.

No Eddie Dean ever recovered any fragment of a former life as an unhappy, laughing gunslinger.

3) The levels of the tower are numberless, and at the same time, can always be factored by nineteen.

4) Bird and bear and hare and hound, nothing's lost that's never found.

5) Even the damned may love.


End file.
